Mobile Growth with Morgan Brown — Lecture notes

Bayram Annakov
Mobile Growth
Published in
3 min readFeb 23, 2015

Morgan Brown has recently gave outstanding talk on mobile growth (thanks BranchMetrics for organising this meetup), so I decided to list my notes on this talk.

Morgan Brown

Notes:

  1. There is absolutely no correlation btw growth rate and amount of money companies spend on it
  2. The Startup Pyramid — 3 stage process for growth by Sean Ellis:
  • Product/market fit — determines your upside opportunity — > retention metrics help understand if your product has product/market fit. “If you don’t have a 4star rating, don’t spend time on growth, fix the product first”

3. Stewart Hall “7 minute workout” — > 5 part blog post “App Store Experiment

4. Get the model right: huge gap between free and 1 penny — > free with in-app purchases is the best model for mobile app

5. Growth as a process: not a collection of random events, but rather a systematic approach how to acquire users (cadence)

  • Ideas — currency of growth — > deep backlog of ideas how to acquire users
  • Test — really hard in mobile, but great products (such as Branch Metrics)
  • Analyze
  • Optimize
  • And repeat

6. Even the quality of the test is not that significant than being able to quickly move through this growth process

7. Growth is organisational priority

8. Understand what actions turn your users into long term users, and make sure all users perform that action

9. Prioritise ideas (impact, confidence, easy of implementation)

10. How many experience have I run vs HubSpot 8K experiments? ☺

11. Experiments don’t matter if you have no idea if it works or not (lack metrics)

HotelTonight: conversion rates went up over poor data connection (4G vs wireless) — > Why? If you’re on wifi you will go to booking.com/expedia & etc, but if you’re on 4G, you’re not going to deal with all those websites, because it is much better. So they doubled down on users connecting via 4G!

13. Learning drives growth — > Tamara Steffens “This Woman Has Landed Millions of App Installs

14. Mobile Growth Stack — Andy Carvell from SoundCloud post & video

Organic Mobile Growth Engine

  1. ASO: How visible you are — Mobile Action
  2. Understand the System — ASO cheatsheet + use App in the Air’s checklist
  3. Driving positive reviews — don’t nag your users, ask it in the UI (not popups, in feed for example with questions “are you enjoying app?”)
  4. Turn negative reviews — App in the Air’s approach to converting negative reviews to positive: post & video: → thank you, Morgan, for mentioning us ☺
  5. Mobile SEO
  • urbanspoon — showing in top results on search engines
  • don’t forget even if you’re native app

6. Press/Partnerships

7. Virality

  • User referral programs
  • How to track everything — BranchMetrics
  • Net Promoter Score
  • One to many referrals — brand ambassadors, get them on your side, give incentives to invite friends

8. Localisation

9. Inflection points

  • Evernote — the first app ready for the next release of iOS, got featured all the time (not sustainable growth, but gives great momentum)
  • Look for big events, conferences & other events to piggyback on

10. Emails

  1. Double down on what’s working
  2. Tools — > see Morgan’s Twitter: @morganb
  3. Slides & Video

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Bayram Annakov
Mobile Growth

CEO of App in the Air (3M+ users), Systems Thinker. Follow me on Twitter: @bayka